When the Woodstock Art Gallery reopens to the public later in February, there will be three intriguing new exhibits waiting to be seen.
Tanya Talaga Above Thunder Bay, 2019, oil on linen
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When the Woodstock Art Gallery reopens to the public later in February, there will be three intriguing new exhibits waiting to be seen.
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Closed since mid-November for a major roof repair, as well as delays related to the COVID-19 pandemic, the gallery’s Feb. 19 reopening – and this suite of new shows – will roughly coincide with Family Day.
“We’re really excited to finally reopen again. It’s been quite a long haul with COVID, but we’re pleased and delighted that, come Family Day, we will have a whole new round of exhibitions we can offer to Woodstock and Oxford county,” said Mary Reid, the director and curator of the Woodstock Art Gallery.
As part of the Family Day celebrations on Monday, Feb. 21, the gallery will be partnering with Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada for an art grab-bag giveaway.
The 400 art bags will be handed out – one per family – through curbside pickup on a first-come first-service basis. Reid recommended showing up early for the giveaway since the art bags tend to be extremely popular.
“The first time we did it, they ran out in 10 minutes,” Reid said.
The first new exhibit in the downtown gallery space features artwork designed to enhance contemplation and relaxation.
“The idea is just to slow down – maybe not necessarily meditate – but to move into a much more kind of peaceful and relaxed presence,” Reid said.
The exhibit, A Moment of Mindfulness, features selections from the gallery’s permanent collection that inspire the state “of being present”.
“With COVID, we’re all holding on to so much stress and anxiety, and we really wanted to create an exhibition that provides some respite, some relief, so when you leave the exhibition you feel lighter and you generally feel better about everything,” Reid said.
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The second exhibit – displayed on the gallery’s second floor – is called Many Lives Mark this Place and features the work of artist John Hartman.
Hartman is known for his landscape paintings but recently turned his attention to portraits, Reid said. This collection is a series of portraits of various famous Canadian authors amid landscapes of great personal importance.
“If you are a lover of Canadian fiction and non-fiction, many of these things will be very recognizable to you,” said Reid.
While there are 37 pieces available in this collection, the Woodstock gallery will only be displaying 11 of the portraits due to their large sizes.
The touring collection, initially featured at the McMicheal Canadian Art Collection in March 2020, was temporarily put on hold due to COVID but is now circulating again, Reid said. The exhibit will eventually be travelling to Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland before = finishing its tour in Sarnia by 2023.
The final exhibit, Common Collective: Controlled Burn, features work by new media artists based out of nearby Stratford.
These artists work primarily with projection, video and sound, Reid said.
For this show, the artists decided to pay homage to family farms by taking video and audio of a burning barn and using that to reflect what they see happening to farming and changing agricultural practices in Southwestern Ontario, Reid said.
“We’re really excited,” Reid added about showing these new exhibits in person.
The gallery will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Feb. 19 and from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Feb. 21.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
